Beach themed teddy bear cookie cupcakes

After 9 years of birthdays and birthday cakes, I’ve finally decided to keep it simple and save myself a lot of stress and worry. I guess I wasn’t worried about producing a cake for the kid’s birthdays but was more worried about baking 30-odd cupcakes for their class on a day close to their actual birthday, a cake for their actual birthday and THE birthday cake for the party. I doubted my abilities and would always stress when it came time to icing THE party birthday cake but managed to pull it off (to my standards). At the end of the day, it didn’t matter if I produced a cake with the stress or without the stress. The kids still loved it all the same. Its taken me 9 years to realise its all about them, not about me.

I first saw this idea on Pinterest and thought they were pretty cute. My daughter wasn’t having a birthday party this year as her actual birthday coincided with her Dad’s work Christmas party. She decided to have two girls from her class accompany her, her brother and I to the local swimming pool (which was a disaster because one girl turned out to be really mean to my daughter and ignore her – never again). We had these cupcakes on our return from the pool.

They are so easy to put together. I made 6 large cupcakes (using a *cough cough* packet cake mix) and a small round cake which I iced with blue icing. I was going to make ‘sand’ using biscuit crumbs but I had leftover yellow coloured coconut which I used up. The ‘teddy’ cookies just so happened to have a chocolate bottom which I actually zapped in the microwave for about 20 seconds to slightly melt the chocolate so they would adhere to the sour candy strips which I cut up for the towel. A paper umbrella poked into the sour candy strip to make sure it stayed and that was that. My kids loved them.

There was of course the obligatory actual day birthday cake which needle candles for blowing out and the small round cake I made with the leftover batter was just enough for two teddy cookies, a boy and a girl just like my two. One down, one to go and his birthday is this Sunday. It will be easy too.

A day (off) at #Mooloolaba Beach

Yesterday was a day off for the children. Over the 10 day period our Royal National Show (or “Ekka” as it’s also known as) is on for, various parts of the South East Queensland region have days off. It’s a bit of a debacle really because it all depends on where you work as to which day you have off. So if you work in Brisbane city but live where I do, your children would have the day off and on Wednesday, the Brisbane city area has a day off but your children would be at school. It doesn’t directly affect me but I’m sure it would be a real pain for others. Anyway, we set off for a day at the beach because the temperature was forecast to be 29 deg C (about 85 deg F). Not bad for a winter’s day. Here’s a few photos from the day.

This is a beach I frequented many times in my life. My grandparents retired from their dairy farm to this part of Queensland in 1969 so every time we visited them, my Dad and grandfather would take us for a swim while the ‘women folk’ stayed home to prepare lunch. I dipped my toe into the water but the water temperature was still in ‘winter’ mode.

My son loved the waves (although they are a lot smaller in this section of the coast) but ‘her royal highness’ prefers a swimming pool even though she loved playing in the sand.

I had such a relaxing time, soaking up the sun and watching the children. Made it very hard to concentrate for the hour plus drive home. In my younger days, I can remember being at this beach all day, having a few drinks, driving home and heading out to party until all hours of the morning. I couldn’t even imagine doing that now.